Sold a friend my PS3, now it's flaky

[MegaManFan]

It's an original 20 GB with PS2 backward compatibility and four USB slots. Here's what he had to say.

 

 

Ok, let the system sit overnight with absolutely no power to it. Powered up, ran a game of Motorstorm fine. About 5 minutes in, started glitching again.

Here's where it gets weird - it only glitches on disc based games. If you set to go out to quit the game (i.e., via the Playstation button), the glitches go away! But it is ONLY when you are on the Playstation screen. Go back to playing the game? Glitches all return.

And it never, EVER glitches if you are playing a hard drive based game.

So very weird...any ideas?

 

Any advice from the helpful people here at the AA community?

 

[+moycon]

I'm the last person you'd want to ask, but it sounds like it would have to be something with the disk drive itself doesn't it?

[CPUWIZ]

Any game that streams data from the BD, will likely glitch or in some cases just crash, if the disc drive is bad. Although, the discs could be severely screwed up as well.

[Keatah]

If you fail to fix it, I'd say man-up and allow a full refund.

[VW]

The blu ray drives on launch model PS3s have a high failure rate, if you're lucky you can clean the lens with a Qtip soaked in cleaning alcohol and it will work again. There are several good youtube videos to show you how to do that. If that doesn't work, then you have a bad drive and can search ebay for replacement drives for your particular model.

[MegaManFan]

Thanks gang. I've passed along both VW and CPU's comments.